"A blog is to a writer what a canvas is to an artist." ~ Colleen Redman

~ The following 2016 review was done by excerpting the first line or few in one post from each month last year. You can click on the name of the month for a full accounting.

January – The juncos stand precariously on snow. They can’t feel the ground beneath them. Their black bodies hop like clipped silhouettes, as if they floated to the top from the underworld. How long will I live in a house of rooms and fret that that power will go out while counting the days between my sister’s death and her birthday’s fast approach?

February – When the snow that starts falling is the size of corn flakes, I think about all the milk being sold at the grocery store so that the kids who won’t have school tomorrow can eat cereal in the morning. And that’s what you’d get if you let a poet report the weather.

March – Kings, portals, crowns and zombies. Aliens, quicksand, good guys and bad are all the elements of good story drama. He draws the scenes and dictates the action, and I write the words. Then we read “the book” to others. Studies have shown that story telling and dramatic play build brain networks in young children like no other activity. And the benefits go both ways. I’m as nourished by looking at kids’ art as I am watching a sunset, even if there is ninjas and blood.

April – Lying in bed last week with something like the flu, I noticed a perfect swordfish shape in the knotty pine logs in my bedroom that I hadn’t noticed in all the 25 years I’ve lived in our cabin. Talking about being sick, in every email I sent that day, I typed FU by mistake, instead of FLU.

May – It’s too late for Woodstock but not for that leopard-skin pillbox-hat, the one Bob Dylan made fun of and Jackie O passed over for pink. It’s too late to wear a bikini, to live at the beach off writer’s royalties, but it’s never too late to know a groove from a rut, to wear your heart on your sleeve and let it break.

June – We made it to the big sandbox where the sand is too hot to walk on without flip flops, where young architects make castles with moats and beach-goers plant umbrellas like astronauts plant flags on the moon.

July – Every Little Kiss with a Jerry Twist: I’m pretty sure I heard Bruce Hornsby keeping time by repeating “Pokemon Go” a few times during his Main Stage Sunday performance that closed this year’s Floydfest. He spoke of his friendship with Jerry Garcia and how he missed having Jerry play on his new songs. “So I sampled his ass,” he said. I looked up the term and it means when musicians use borrowed sections of music from other recordings in their new works.

August – Waiting for a meteorite to shoot across the sky is like waiting for a blind date to show up. I’m alone in the dark in the middle of the yard and nothing happens. And nothing happens…

September – It was Australia vs. Myrtle Beach and marked the beginning of the “We Bought a House! Housewarming Party,” hosted by my son Josh and his girlfriend Emily in Marshall, NC.

October – I’ve taken to wearing cat ears during the Halloween season and yesterday Joe called me the “Cat’s Meow.”

November – I realized just how small our house is when during the Saturday 16 Hands Studio Tour our two downstairs rooms-turned-galleries were as full as a crowded dance floor that I couldn’t turn or spin around on.

December – Some people are more worried about the imagined war on Christmas than they are about with a war with China or a merger with Russia. Christmas Night Lights as seen through a beer glass are HERE.

I remember some of these as if they were just last month. Well the pillbox hat one had a reminder then, so that’s kind of a cheat — but others I recall make me happy to know I’m not losing my memory yet.

About

From the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia I write to synthesize what I'm learning at the time, whether it be poetry, a political commentary, or a letter to my family in Hull, Massachusetts, where I'm originally from. Whenever I don't know exactly what it is I'm doing and it borders on wasting my time, I call it research. 'Dear Abby, How can I get rid of freckles?' was my first published piece at the age of 11.